io MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly 

 veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive 

 mind, to shine in its glory even through the apparent 

 folly and wickedness of Man. The poet, the artist, and 

 the lover are seekers after that glory : the haunting 

 beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun. 

 But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision : what 

 others dimly seek he knows, with a knowledge beside 

 which all other knowledge is ignorance. 



The second characteristic of mysticism is its belief in 

 unity, and its refusal to admit opposition or division 

 anywhere. We found Heraclitus saying ' good and ill 

 are one " ; and again he says, " the way up and the way 

 down is one and the same." The same attitude appears 

 in the simultaneous assertion of contradictory pro- 

 positions, such as : " We step and do not step into the 

 same rivers ; we are and are not." The assertion of Par- 

 menides, that reality is one and indivisible, comes from 

 the same impulse towards unity. In Plato, this impulse 

 is less prominent, being held in check by his theory of 

 ideas ; but it reappears, so far as his logic permits, in the 

 doctrine of the primacy of the Good. 



A third mark of almost all mystical metaphysics is the 

 denial of the reality of Time. This is an outcome of the 

 denial of division ; if all is one, the distinction of past 

 and future must be illusory. We have seen this doctrine 

 prominent in Parmenides ; and among moderns it is 

 fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel. 



The last of the doctrines of mysticism which we have 

 to consider is its belief that all evil is mere appearance, 

 an illusion produced by the divisions and oppositions of 

 the analytic intellect. Mysticism does not maintain that 

 such things as cruelty, for example, are good, but it 

 denies that they are real : they belong to that lower 



